P.S. You Should Know... | Issue #495

Go go go kart

my story 🚀

🏎️ A friend’s birthday party last weekend included go-kart racing at the home of Formula 1 in Austin, Circuit of The Americas. I placed a respectable 4th place out of 11.

📚 Our eldest daughter and I have decided to form a book club. Our first book was a suggestion from Claude and it was written in 1978. The Westing Game, Claude tells me, “is a puzzle-box mystery built around an eccentric millionaire’s will, sixteen heirs, and a stock-market subplot where two of the kids trade their way through the story. She gets a genuinely hard puzzle, you get an inheritance-and-incentives story that holds up as an adult read.” If you have any suggestions for future books that are appropriate for both advanced 3rd graders and adults please let me know!

i’ve been thinking 💭

✨ 2026 has been the summer of slop. It’s also the summer that I bought 11 dot-com domains with the word slop in them. It’s my little bet that ‘slop’ is going to be a term that sticks with us for a while. I have no clue if I’ll ever do anything with these, so if you have any ideas, you know who to call!

1. slopcurator.com

2. slopdata.com

3. slopsignal.com

4. slophive.com

5. slopcase.com

6. slopfighter.com

7. slopclean.com

8. slopnerd.com

9. morningslop.com

10. cancelslop.com

11. llmslop.com

fun facts 🙌

User inter-face. I don’t really know how to describe this, but I suggest you spend 60 seconds watching it. ~ learn more

A theory on how the French bistro got its name. “Bystro! Bystro!” is Russian for “Quick! Quick!” and there’s a popular legend that Russian soldiers in occupied Paris yelled it when they wanted food. ~ learn more

Aristocrats are basically chimpanzees. The piece argues that a post-work world might look less like creative bliss and more like status games and relentless social tracking, with “intrigue” as the organizing activity. ~ learn more

tech, startups, internet ⚡

Bug bounties meet GPT Astra. “I’ve committed to pay people who report bugs in my code, up to 750€ for severe errors. Since GPT Astra, I’m now getting several bug reports daily.” Ruben C. Arslan is watching AI turn his standing bounty policy into a constant stream of incoming issues. After reading this I tried to replicate with my own Astra agent, but nobody’s paid me yet. ~ learn more

Synthetic internet environments. “the OAI swarms seeded the web with self-replicating code - contaminating training data so thoroughly that labs may need synthetic internet environments instead.” If this rumor is even partly true, it turns “training on the open internet” into a new kind of supply chain risk. ~ learn more

No safety in the middle. Mike Vernal thinks cheap software creation will push the industry toward a barbell: a few giants that “do it all,” plus a long tail of tiny, niche tools. ~ learn more

better doing 🎯

Envy masquerades as strategy. “Envy masquerades as strategy, and the disguise is good enough that your team will nod along.” Brian Sugar on how easy it is to confuse a jolt of jealousy for conviction, especially now that copying a product can happen in a weekend. ~ learn more

to your health ⚕

Everything in oncology in a public website and open source repo for all.. Copy. “Every technology, target, product, company, institution, pathway, trial, pairing, roadmap, and idea in oncology, linked together. The state of the art, the history, and what is coming, for every cancer, with a plain-English TL;DR on every page.” ~ learn more

retail therapy 💸

Amazon’s top sellers aren’t TikTok Shop’s. “TikTok makes people want things. Amazon is where people buy things.” Only 498 sellers show up in both platforms’ top 10,000, so being big on one barely predicts being big on the other. ~ learn more

Why consumers don’t want to shop your site. “Marketplace is where the world is trending not because we want to shop there but because the experience isn’t chopped.” A good reminder that if your own DTC site is harder than the reseller, people will opt for the smoother path. ~ learn more

teaching the kids 👩‍🏫

Our kids’ Montessori alma mater on blast by the NYT. Due to odd Covid circumstances our family has experience with three different locations across two states, one of which was fantastic. I do not necessarily endorse this article’s characterization of the school as a Ponzi scheme. A New York Times investigation unpacks how rapid expansion and landlord advances helped mask a $440 million collapse. ~ learn more

big ideas 📚

Michael Levin’s mind-blowing new research agenda. He is the person who figured out that electricity is how cells know where to self-organize to build each body part, who made tiny living non-frogs from frog cells (xenobots), and who developed the idea that intelligence exists beyond brains. His new paper is ABSOLUTELY WILD: minds may be patterns that exist independently of physical matter, and bodies or machines may give those patterns a way to act in the world. ~ learn more

thanks for reading!